"The importance of the International Literature Festival Berlin is manifest in its very title, for it is a festival that welcomes writers from many countries, not from only the same old, same old ones. Thus it’s possible to meet a Cuban poet or an Estonian essayist or a writer who uses the language of the colony in which he or she was born, rather than the ones his parents speak. It’s this variety, this broad choice of genre, that makes the festival important and, at least for the writers who attend, very interesting because we get to meet people who do the same work we do but who do it in an entirely different way."